Ahmad Jamal: 02/07/1930 – 16/04/2023

“Listen to the way Ahmad Jamal uses space,” said Miles Davis. “He lets it go so you can feel the rhythm section and the rhythm section can feel you. It’s not crowded.” As one of Jamal’s greatest fans, and undoubtedly influenced by him, Miles homed in on the aspect of Jamal’s playing that was just as evident in his early days after turning professional in 1950 as in his most recent recordings of the 2010s. This space in his playing, plus his outstanding dynamic control, meant that the audience was as much his instrument as the piano. Hearing him in one of his favourite clubs, the Regattabar in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1994, I wrote: “All that accompanied the quieter passages was the tapping of well-shod feet on the deep carpet – not a murmur of conversation, not a chink of a glass, as listeners fell under his spell.”

That dynamic mastery was equally to the fore in one of his last UK appearances at the Royal Festival Hall in 2014, but so too was an overall level of pianistic command that put him among the highest echelon of any keyboard players in any genre. There were left hand trills that ran flawlessly for entire choruses as his right hand teased out delicate melodies one minute and then darted across his left to create thunderous low register chords. In several interviews over the last thirty years, he usually said he preferred to be recorded in a live setting, and from his first great success At The Pershing in 1958, through sets at the Blackhawk, at Bubba’s in Fort Lauderdale, via the exceptional recent releases of his 1960s dates at the Seattle Penthouse, right up to live recordings from Paris and Montreux, interaction with his listeners has been a vital element of his music.

Jamal grew up in Pittsburgh, acutely aware of its musical history, and that, in his words, “it was an area that nurtured every musician to grow up with their own unique identity”. He recalled that alumni of his High School (Westinghouse) also included such striking individual talents as Erroll Garner and Dodo Marmarosa. In 1951, he took over Joe Bushkin’s slot at the Embers club in New York, thereby inheriting Papa Jo Jones on drums as a member of his trio at the same time. He then briefly adopted the Tatum / Nat Cole formula of piano, guitar and bass, with Ray Crawford and Eddie Calhoun, before bringing in drummer Vernell Fournier and settling on the line-up of his first really famous trio with bassist Israel Crosby. Their single release of ‘Ponciana’ from the Pershing recordings became a chart hit.

“It’s a startling fact when an instrumental gets a hit,” he told me. “Singers get hits, but instrumentalists rarely do.” He was also amazed that despite the dominance of the two-and-a-half minute single, his seven-and-a half-minute EP got “all the airtime we could have hoped for”.

The interaction with bassists was always crucial for him, and as well as Jamil Nasser who was with him from 1964-76 and again in the 1990s, Jamal also had long musical partnerships with James Cammack, John Heard and Richard Evans. Equally, he created lengthy associations with drummers, notably those with New Orleans lineage, from Fournier, via Idris Muhammad, to Herlin Riley.

From his early days, Jamal wrote a number of originals, including his ‘New Rhumba’, which Miles recorded. More recently he tended to bring more of his own writing into his performances.

His album Marseille, from 2016, was a studio creation (following a short period in which he abstained from playing live concerts) but included a number of originals. He put this down to time spent away from the road. “My compositions arrive,” he said. “I don't sit down to consciously write them, they dictate themselves.” Hence he created the title track of the album and crafted his own lyrics for it, to be sung by Mina Agossi as well as narrated by the French-based Congolese rapper Abd Al Malik. To display the talents of his regular percussionist Manolo Badrena, the piece that dictated itself for him was a percussive fantasy called Pots en verre (Glass pots).

Jamal always preferred the term ‘American Classical Music’ to the word jazz, and his long creative life was recognised by an NEA American Jazz Masters Award, and then in 2017 a Grammy for Lifetime Achievement. In later life he also retained a special affection for France, saying: “I worked exclusively with French record companies for twenty-five years or so, and in 2007 the French government awarded me the Order of Arts and Letters. France gave me a lot: both joie de vivre and respect for my music!”